Creating, Nurturing With Your Child

FAMILY MATTERS - Kurt Greenbaum

My wife heard the squeals from the back porch at mid-afternoon one day last week.

Knowing they weren't screams of terror, she peeked out the window to find our daughter, Sarah, pointing at a small plot of earth outside the screen.

The radishes had germinated.

Just three days earlier, she and I took hoe, shovel and rake in hand, tore up a tiny plot of sod and tilled a tiny garden.

The Easter Bunny had delivered the seeds weeks earlier; we just hadn't found the time to plant them until now. So while her father grunted in the afternoon heat, yanking strips of St. Augustine grass from the ground, Sarah gleefully delivered earthworms for her mother to see.

They say a garden is a wonderful learning lesson for children, something that inspires questions and encourages curiosity. My only hope is we don't learn too much about disaster: I do not have a green thumb. The plant in my office has teetered on the brink of death, and has been brought back to life several times.

Unfortunately, that may be one of our first lessons: The recent rains have practically drowned half of our 5-foot-wide plot.

At one point, the water stood an inch deep where carrot seeds should have been sprouting.

"What if the water drowns our garden?" Sarah asked.

"I guess we'll learn something from that, won't we?" I answered.

"We have to move part of our garden," she decided.

We'll wait and see how it goes.

Radishes, the experts also say, are an excellent choice for children because they sprout so quickly. That is obviously true. They're an inch high already, and the directions say we could be garnishing our salads within three weeks.

I suspect the biggest disappointment will be when Sarah tastes them; she's a finnicky eater and radishes may not agree with her.

The balance of the crop consists of sunflowers, two rows of them (the Giant Grey variety, for those of you who know something about flowers), and Danvers Half Long carrots ("thick shoulders tapering to a blunt end'').

I don't have high hopes for any of these crops growing close to looking like a recognizable flower or vegetable.

But I have high hopes the garden will yield plenty of curiosity.

Sarah has held an earthworm for the first time; she has eagerly embraced the chance to water and care for something - even to start weeding when the rain breaks.

She gets to watch something grow and her eagle eyes have spotted the small sunflower stems uncurling their necks from the soil.

And she and her father have had a few chances to share some time and talk.